% gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 3.1 20020420 (prerelease)
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. [ yeah, no shit, Sherlock ]

Will upgrading my gcc break everything? Probably. Should I do it anyway? Probably.

Actually, upgrading gcc sounds about as appealing as a quadruple root canal. Maybe I can use gcc2 (2.95.2) instead.

Wish that parents-in-law would get the faster internets at their house.

Eat breakfast.

Installing gcc on a full stomach is probably better anyway (though quite possibly not). Unzip the tarball. Notice that INSTALL is a directory. That's already a bad sign.

Hope that autoconf; ./configure; make; make install will just work, since I don't have the attention span for anything else.

Run make.

For some reason, the configure script thinks that my PPC laptop is an i386. ./configure doesn't do anything. Nor does ./configure --help.

No, actually it thinks I want to build a cross-compiler. Why would I want that?

Apparently the hosts to build for are controlled by the HOSTS environment variable, or maybe it's set somewhere in one of the config files. I'm not sure. Nor am I sure why I have the attention span to grovel through the sources but not to read the documentation.

For the 65536th time in my life, consider destroying everything Turing-complete and then going out to enjoy the big room with the blue ceilings.

Apparently you can also set the TARGETS environment variable. Try setting it to ppc also.

??????????????????????????????????????????
? Host type i386 should also be a target ?
??????????????????????????????????????????

Well, maybe if I could also set the HOSTS to just ppc, that wouldn't be a problem.

Use grep again (the only IDE I'll ever need) and figure out to edit the GNUmakefile to change the HOSTS = and targets = lines to obliterate any and all traces of i386. There's probably a better way. At this point I don't care.

Start make again. It is, at least, convinced that it only wants to be building a ppc compiler, without any of that crazy i386 nonsense.

Apparently, not only does it think it should be using cc instead of gcc (which are supposed to be the same anyway, no?), the PATH isn't getting exported correctly, because cc is certainly in /usr, which is in my PATH.